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The global strategists at Société Générale, who must be doing something right. The team rose from 24th to second place in the Extel Survey this year, knocking Smith Barney Citigroup into third place. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein took the top spot again.

The equity market’s violent reaction to seemingly innocuous data has puzzled many commentators. At first bond investors reacted much more calmly to inflation fears but subsequently they seem to have been infected by the equity investors’ pessimism.

In the June edition of Euromoney, our story ‘Spac probe hits wall of silence ’ contained a quote wrongly attributed to Floyd Wittlin of Bingham McCutchen. Our apologies to all concerned.

UBS for being voted the best equity research house in Europe in the Thomson Extel Survey for the sixth year in a row. The Swiss bank also got the most votes from institutional investors and sell-side rivals for European equity trading and execution.

29 the percentage of asset allocators describing themselves in Merrill Lynch’s Fund Manager Survey as overweight. The figure is one of the highest ever recorded by the survey.

Efforts to launch a CMBS index in Europe have foundered, so the proponents of the product have now decided to abandon the original project and start again.

Kuwait’s largest project financing to date closed on June 14.

Hungary’s fiscal weakness has rating agencies worried. Even before the mid-month downgrading of Hungary’s sovereign debt, Budapest’s equities markets began to adopt the same gloomy outlook as Standard & Poor’s. The government’s debt levels are on track to exceed 74% of GDP by 2009, up from 60% at current levels. High deficit spending is expected to fall just barely, overshadowing noble efforts on the part of Hungary’s socialist-liberal government to consolidate its finances. Central bankers notched up rates by 175 basis points to bolster the forint and stave off inflation risk. This, combined with a tax increase, could significantly hurt growth prospects.

The panel for the second session at Standard Chartered’s China and Africa forum had already faced some tough questions on poverty and corruption, so they must have been uneasy when the Standard Chartered banker who popped up at the last minute took an even tougher line.

In an interesting reversal, Robert Palache is to join Morgan Stanley, the firm from which he poached a high-profile three-man CMBS team in 2003. At the time Palache was head of real estate, corporate securitization and infrastructure finance at Barclays Capital, and hired Lynn Gilbert, Christian Janssen and Natalie Howard from Morgan Stanley’s CMBS team to build up its CMBS Conduit, Eclipse. Now Palache, who walked out of BarCap in March this year, joins Morgan and reports to John Hyman and Ellen Brunsberg, the woman from whom he poached Gilbert and team in 2003. In his new role, Palache will focus on further developing the bank’s securitization origination business in Europe in areas such as infrastructure, whole business and new asset securitizations.

Bradford & Bingley’s treasurer, Peter Green, and head of capital markets and securitization, Mark Winter, want to regain ownership from investment banks of their institution’s dialogue with investors. They are following a simple strategy of diversifying the investor base. Allied to a remarkable level of transparency during the printing of new issues, this is already reaping its rewards. Alex Chambers reports.

Euromoney Awards for excellence 2006